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Cuil New Search Engine

There’s a new search engine in town and it’s pretty Cuil. Cuil is a stealth search engine startup which claims that it can index web pages significantly faster and cheaper than Google. Cuill has told potential investors that their indexing costs will be 1/10th of Google’s, based on new search architectures and relevance methods.

Cuil was founded by the husband and wife team and Tom Costello and Anna Patterson. They were joined by Russell Power. Patterson and Power are ex-Google search experts. Costello was the founder of Xift. With that kind of credentials, it wasn’t hard to raise $30 million in start up funding.

Is It a Better Google?

Cuil claims to have 121,617,892,992 web pages indexed, more than any other search engine. It’s also taking on a very evil (stealth?) look with it’s all black background. It’s really too early to tell if Cuil can be a better Google since it’s only 24 hours old. However, it is nice to see that Cuil ranks me number 1 for John Chow. All the other searches I’ve performed on it produced pretty good results as well. I especially like the related categories, which return results that are extremely relevant.

Give the new search engine a try and tell me what you think. Let’s hope Cuil makes it because we need something to prevent Google from taking over the Internet.

BTW – Don’t misspell Cuil by switching the i and the l or you’re end up on a porn site.

52 thoughts on “Cuil New Search Engine”

I tried it this morning and didn’t like it. I found it to be quite slow to load. I got several 404 and 403 errors. Many sites I tested weren’t indexed. It added strange thumbnails next to the listings of many of my own pages.

I’ve come across many search terms that Cuil is saying they don’t have results for.

“Personal branding” shows no results
“Entrepreneur interviews” shows no results
“Young Entrepreneur” shows no results, despite them having indexed my own Web site (I have that phrase in my ) and they have also indexed youngentrepreneur.com)

Many Web developers have banned the bot from indexing their sites because it uses so much bandwidth.

As far as I can see, this is just another search engine that doesn’t work amongst the many hundreds that are setup each day. Is being ex-Google employees really such a selling point for the media, or am I missing something?

If they weren’t ready, they shouldn’t have announced it. They boast about having indexed more pages than Google, but checking Cuil’s search results would seem to disprove that claim. In any case, they have lost credibility.

See that’s the problem. It hasn’t been just 24 hours. It’s been indexing sites for a long time, building up to this point where their PR guru sent out the press releases. They really flopped, in my opinion.

I tried Cuil earlier this morning, when it was mentioned by someone on twitter and didn’t get the kind of results I expected. Guess it’s a little early to expect the same results as Google.
Google could use some competition, so I’ll be supporting it.

It may be too early to expect the same results as Google, but one should be able to expect at least decent results of some sort. This is not ready for prime time at all. Did it just slip out that they were unveiling it today, or did they intentionally contact the press about it? Because it seems to be a very bad idea to start promoting your search engine when it’s in such a sad state as it is. People will look at the site, see the disappointing results and go right back to Google. Many aren’t going to bother checking Cuil again in the future; they’ll just stick with Google.

Cuil is a sad, sad joke. Poor (and sometimes few) search results. Sometimes the same page and URL will appear on multiple pages of a search. And lots of irrelevant results. And plenty of sites just completely missing. On one search I did, for a keyword I rank well on in Google, I wasn’t listed at all. Nor were many of my competitors. And a lot of sites that were showing up weren’t related at all.

Its not a scientific test, but after performing a handful of test searches (when the site was working) I found Google had more search results in every case. Ignoring the number of results, I still find Google’s results to be better and more relevant but I see lots of potential for Cuil.

Well, some results look okay but all the searches I am number one or in the top 10 for on Google don’t even show on this site. If I google my name I am always number one on Google and my site doesn’t even show.

I did a search for the terms “tailgating ideas” on there and my site, tailgatingideas.com, did not come up at all. you would think when using the exact search terms it would come up. I looked for way to submit my site to be indexed…. no such luck. Based on that alone Cuil blows. How can you claim to have a ton of pages indexed but no way to submit ones they do not have?

Releasing something along the lines of a search engine before it’s tried and tested, and proved its worth is like shooting geese with cannons. Might be effective, but makes more of a mess than deal with the obvious challenge: getting food on the table.

Pardon my french in pointing it out: but it doesn’t cut it in the business world. We don’t have an utopia of fancy pink skies yet.

If we deal in and with reality we have a better chance in succeeding in ALL aspects of life, imho. 🙂

I don’t mind it… Sure the format could be refined a little bit, the results too… Was happy to find some of the terms we have worked hard on quite high in the results, where as some where there was a weaker market and hence only onpage seo was required… have not ranked very well… so it looks like this search engine is very citation/authority based.
Thanks

Are you kidding me?? Cuil is terrible! The search results are completely off base and only marginally better than the horrendous search results of Yahoo and MSN. Content based search algorithms currently do not work.

Speaking of sites launching yesterday. Have you already checked out http://www.TrafficMarks.com. It is a FREE new SEO tool that helps you quickly identify the top authority sites in your niche to get links from.

It produced inferior results for me, including some simple searches that yielded NO results. And their “About Cuil” page yielded a 404 error. Test this stuff before you put your site up! Good luck to them.

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